In short, I was a political-ethical idiot. Normally, this deficiency might have been inconsequential, but these were abnormal times. If New Yorkers were not already jumpy enough from the constant reminders of the code orange level of terrorist threat, there was another peril to concern us: the fires underfoot. The extraordinary quantities of snow and street salt were combining, apparently, to eat away at the municipal electrical system, with the result that, all winter and into the spring, underground wires caught light and flames spreading under the streets blew up thousands of manholes on sidewalks from Long Island City to Jamaica to the East Village, the detonations shooting cast-iron manhole covers fifty feet into the air. It was Chuck Ramkissoon who alerted me to this danger. After our January outing he’d placed me on his electronic mailing list, and two or three times a week I was one of around a dozen—“Dear friends,” he called us — to receive messages about whatever was on his mind: cricket, American history, birding, sales of Brooklyn real estate, meteorological phenomena, interesting economic data, resonant business stories (there was an item, perhaps for my special benefit, about Arctic gas), and eye-catching miscellanea such as the business of the electrical inferno. He signed them all,
CHUCK RAMKISSOON
President, New York Cricket Club
Chuck Cricket Corp. had been replaced by a grander entity.
Often Chuck’s e-mails simply provided links to Web sites he found interesting, but when the message was concerned with his cricket undertaking he might give us the benefit of his own musings. One such memorandum was headed NOT AN IMMIGRANT SPORT. Its text — still preserved in my electronic filing cabinet — was as follows:
Cricket was the first modern team sport in America. It came before baseball and football. Cricket has been played in New York since the 1770s. The first international team sports fixtures anywhere were cricket matches between the USA and Canada in the 1840s and 1850s. In those days cricket matches in New York were watched by thousands of fans. It was a professional sport reported in all the newspapers. There were clubs all over the country, in Newark, Schenectady, Troy, Albany, San Francisco, Boston, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Baltimore and Philadelphia. In Philadelphia alone there were dozens of clubs and the magnificent facilities of Philadelphia Cricket Club, Merion Cricket Club and Germantown Cricket Club are still standing today. (The fields are mostly used for lawn tennis.) It was not until the First World War that the sport went into sharp decline for complicated reasons.So it is wrong to see cricket in America as most people see it i.e. an immigrant sport. It is a bona fide American pastime and should be regarded as such. All those who have attempted to “introduce” cricket to the American public have failed to understand this. Cricket is already in the American DNA. With proper promotion, marketing, government support etc awareness of the game could easily be reawakened. American kids could once again play their country’s oldest team sport!
One recipient of this missive copied his reply to all of Chuck’s addressees:
WhoeverCould you please stop sending me crazy junk mail?!
Although I glanced at them, I didn’t respond to Chuck’s communications. My instinct was to keep him at a distance, at that distance, certainly, that we introduce between ourselves and those we suspect of neediness. I was wondering, for example, when he was going to ask me for money for his cricket scheme. But I was also drawn to Chuck. I had him down as a lover of contingencies and hypotheses, a man cheerfully operating in the subjunctive mood. The business world is densely margined by dreamers, men, almost invariably, whose longing selves willingly submit to the enchantment of projections and pie charts and crisply totted numbers, who toy and toy for years, like novelists, with the same sheaf of documents, who slip out of bed in the middle of the night to pitch to a pajama’d reflection in a windowpane. I’ve never been open to the fantastical aspect of business. I’m an analyst — a bystander. I lack entrepreneurial wistfulness. In other respects, of course, I’m as faraway as they come. That winter, for example, when the cricket World Cup was being played in southern Africa and several old teammates of mine played for the Netherlands against the great Indians and Australians, I imagined that events long ago had taken a different turn and that in my youth I’d discovered the great secret of batting — something to do with the position of the head, maybe, or the preliminary movement of the feet, or a special dedication of memory — with the result (I imagined further on those black mornings when I woke early to follow the Dutch matches on cricinfo.com’s live scoreboard) that I was now one of those orange-clad Hollanders stationed on the pale lawns of Paarl and Potchefstroom, and that when Brett Lee, say, took twenty sprinted strides towards me, and leaped, and hurled the white one-day ball at my toes, the ninety-two-mile-per-hour blur came into focus and hung before me like a Christmas bauble, and with a simple push of my long-handled bat I sent the ball gliding to the boundary’s white rope. How many of us are completely free of such scenarios? Who hasn’t known, a little shamefully, the joys they bring? I suspect that what keeps us harmless from them is not, as many seem to believe, the maintenance of a strict frontier between the kingdoms of the fanciful and the actual, but the contrary: the permitting of a benign annexation of the latter by the former, so that our daily motions always cast a secondary otherworldly shadow and, at those moments when we feel inclined to turn from the more plausible and hurtful meanings of things, we soothingly find ourselves attached to a companion farfetched sense of the world and our place in it. It’s the incompleteness of reverie that brings trouble — that, one might argue, brought Chuck Ramkissoon the worst trouble of all. His head wasn’t sufficiently in the clouds. He had a clear enough view of the gap between where he stood and where he wished to be, and he was determined to find a way across.
However, and to repeat, this wasn’t on my mind at the time — Chuck himself wasn’t on my mind. Other people were, among them Rivera. One morning he came into my office and shut the door and told me he was going to be fired.
I gave the statement my consideration. Rivera, I knew, had recently received a disappointing ranking from the sales force, and this had been followed by a poorly received research paper on Nigeria; but he analyzed midcap stocks, a sector different from mine, and I wasn’t on anything like close enough terms with his boss, Heavey, to judge with any certainty what this might mean. That said, Rivera obviously had reason to worry. We all did. The value of analysts is a matter of opinion, and opinions on Wall Street are at least as fickle as they are anywhere else.
“They’re giving my job to Pallot,” Rivera said.
He stood by the window looking out at the dropping sleet, a little guy in a clean white shirt. His skinny, hairy hands were in the pockets of his pants, gripping and gripping something. Not knowing what to say, I got up and stood next to him, and for a while we surveyed, twenty-two floors down, the roving black blooms of four-dollar umbrellas.
“Sit tight,” I said. “These things blow up and blow away.”
But in early March I came back from two days in Houston and saw that Rivera was gone; Pallot had indeed taken over his desk. When I telephoned Rivera and offered to take him out for a drink, he found a reason to duck out. He was ashamed, was my impression. “Listen, I’m OK,” he said. “I’ve got a bunch of irons in the fire.”
All of this bothered me a lot. One night I went out with Appleby to a bar on the Lower East Side, anxious to talk about Rivera’s fate and scheme in his favor. Appleby, however, had arranged to meet up with friends. He passed the evening telling them jokes I couldn’t quite hear or get, and from time to time they stepped out onto the sidewalk to smoke cigarettes and make calls to carousers elsewhere in the city, returning with reports of parties in Williamsburg and SoHo and, as the night whirled away, leaving me on the rim of things. I drank up and left them to it.